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West and Glaude launch national curriculum on black history, American democracy

Posted March 3, 2006; 04:15 p.m.

by Cass Cliatt

Princeton professors Cornel West and Eddie Glaude have teamed up
with talk-show host Tavis Smiley to launch a national movement to take
critical lessons of black history and American democracy out of the
classroom and into people's homes, churches, book clubs and civic
groups.

The Princeton professors have written an unconventional public course available online called the "Covenant Curriculum: A Study of Black Democratic Action,"
and so far they may have up to 2 million students. An extensive and
far-ranging reading list includes works by Thomas Jefferson, Ida B.
Wells, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Michael Eric Dyson.
The goal is to place the contributions of black Americans into
historical context and to prepare individuals and households to take
action in response to the issues of health care, crime and educational
disparities across the country.

"I resist the idea that to talk
about black America is to somehow engage in a form of narrow identity
politics," said Glaude, an associate professor of religion and the
acting director of Princeton's Program in African-American Studies.
"When you talk about the issue of blacks' access to health care, it’s
not a black issue; we've just rendered it in black terms. This is a
reflection of the American story, particularly to the extent that black
suffering has been an expression of failure of American democracy."

The Covenant Curriculum is a companion to a book titled "The Covenant with Black America," which is a product of six years worth of annual symposia hosted by Smiley to explore the challenges faced by black Americans.

Smiley
asked West and Glaude to write the curriculum -- which was unveiled
Feb. 25 at the latest State of the Black Union symposium in Houston --
to serve as one of the cornerstones of a 10-city "Covenant Tour" that
wraps up this week. The curriculum and the book, which also has
contributions from West, have been presented to groups of 2,500 to
3,000 people at churches in St. Louis, Atlanta, Los Angeles and other
major cities on the tour.

"What we need is an examination of
ourselves, our history and our present that really raises the question,
'What does it take for us to wake up?'" West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion, told the policy-makers, academics, community leaders and others who gathered for the seventh annual symposium Feb. 25.

"It's
time for everyday people to wake up and take power in the face of elite
abusive power," said West, adding that "this particular kind of effort
and action becomes the catalyst for the expansion of democracy across
the board for citizens of various colors and genders and classes and
sexual orientation."

After more than 55 million viewers tuned
in to watch the original broadcast of the State of the Black Union that
launched the Covenant Curriculum last month, more than 2 million people
logged on to the online syllabus, and Web logs tracking time spent on
the site indicate they expressed more than casual interest, Glaude
said. He is confident this demonstrates people are embracing the
curriculum.

Devised as a 15-week syllabus, the curriculum
explores American democracy in the context of the struggles of blacks
in the United States by incorporating historical speeches; works of
social analysis, history, politics and religion; novels and poetry;
analytical essays; and movies and documentaries.

The curriculum
is based on the concept that the health of democracy is best examined
by scrutinizing the people who suffer within the democratic society. It
begins with W.E.B. DuBois' examination of "the problem of the color
line" in "The Souls of Black Folk" and moves on to a discussion of
hypocrisy in the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War and the era
of Jim Crow, before ending with an examination of the black social
movement and black democratic action.

"The covenant curriculum
has been created … to help guide high school students and college
students in the study of black democratic action," Smiley said when
launching the initiative. "If you are a teacher, a professor, a parent,
a community organizer, anyone who leads or works with young people,
this is a tool for you. This curriculum is for anyone quite frankly who
wants a history lesson and contemporary foundation for African-American
progressive political movement."

The self-guided curriculum
calls on participants to independently collect the course
materials, directed by a week-by-week schedule. There are standard
and advanced versions of the curriculum with varying reading loads, and
the standard curriculum includes assignments, such as creating a
timeline of the black experience in America and interviewing a
community member who was part of the black freedom movement of the
1960s and 1970s.

"What we're trying to do is get everyday people to
reflect on their circumstances so they can transform their own lives,"
Glaude said. "So the Covenant is just a lightning rod. We trust
everyday people enough -- we trust black people enough -- to make the
right decisions if they are rightly informed. And we think they can
change their circumstances."

"The irony implicit in American
democracy is that black folks stand as its stringent testing and its
highest possibility for freedom," Glaude added. "The curriculum
functions on three levels: one, to expose the contradictions at the
heart of American democracy; two, to demonstrate the various ways black
folks have struggled for democracy in the face of those contradictions;
and three, to inform our own current practice for bringing about change
with the lessons of the efforts from the past."

The first
organization to adopt the curriculum is the Jamestown Project at Yale
University, a national consortium of academics, policy-makers and
community and business leaders with the mission of enriching American
democracy through scholarship, social justice projects and grassroots
efforts. West is a founding board member, while Glaude is a fellow of
the Jamestown Project.